Текст книги "The Tombs"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“Good luck.” Tibor signed off.

Remi said, “We could find some central place in town and watch for them.”

“Not this time. They know we had a chance to see the inscription on the shield before they did and they’re rushing here. They must have gotten a call from the people at Compagnie Le Clerc and left within an hour or so. If Bako isn’t with them, they won’t be coming into the center of town for good hotels and restaurants. I think they’ll be out searching until they find the grave even if it means sleeping on the ground in the woods.”

They went back to their car, drove to the River, and followed the road that ran parallel to it, searching for any landmark that might signal an undisturbed piece of ancient masonry. They kept going for a couple of hours, then turned around and started to drive in the other direction. As they did, Sam’s cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Sam, this is Tibor again. Bako just went home and came out with two of his men. They were dressed in gear like they were going on a safari. Then a third man pulled up in a truck. I think it means that Bako got a call saying that his men have found the burial chamber. I’m in a car following them at a distance, and I’ve got another car to switch places with me now to keep them from spotting me.”

“This is the second chamber they’ve beaten us to,” said Sam.

“You ended up with both treasures so far, and maybe we’ll end up with this one,” Tibor said. “It can still be sent to a museum and not melted down into bars in Bako’s bank.”

“We’ll try to accomplish that much, at least.”

“I’m calling my brother next to see what Bako’s men have found.”

“I’ll be waiting for word,” Sam said. He ended the call and said to Remi, “We might as well have lunch while we’re waiting.” He drove into Alba Iulia and stopped at a café, where they could see the twelfth-century cathedral and two of the seven gates in the city walls. The oldest city architecture had a hint of Roman influence to it, with rounded arches and square, multilayered towers. Sam set his cell phone on the table.

They had rosól, a stewed-duck-and-vegetable dish, and red wine, and had just begun their dessert of baklava, when Sam’s phone rang. He and Remi looked at each other, then looked at the phone. Sam picked it up. “Hello, Tibor.”

“They’re in the forest on the east side of the town and it looks like they’ve dug a hole. They’ve stopped. Apparently they’re waiting for Bako to arrive before they enter the chamber. I guess he wants to be the first.”

“Where’s Bako now?”

“He’s still about thirty miles away, and we’re driving along the . My brother and cousins are watching the crew at the chamber, but there’s not much they can do. It’s too late to keep Bako from getting there first.”

Sam thought for a moment. “All right, then. Let’s move our strength away from the treasure.”

“ Awayfrom it?”

“Yes. Give me the location and then get everyone back to Hungary. Remi and I will see what we can do on our own.”

“What are you going to do?”

“If it’s too late to keep Bako from finding the treasure, we’ll try to keep him from taking it home.”

“How?”

“I’ll think about it on the way.”

“I have confidence in you. I have many friends, but not one of them has a mind like you—a machine for grinding out crazy ideas.”

“He’s got your number,” Remi said.

“Thank you, Tibor. Please get your brother and cousins back to Szeged. And all of you, take a different, less direct route home.”

“I’ll call you with the exact location.”

“Thanks.” Sam looked at Remi.

“We both meant good crazy.” She kissed his cheek.

The phone rang again, so soon it surprised them both. Sam picked it up and Tibor’s voice said, “I’m close now and I can see where Bako has pulled over. It’s five kilometers from the east city walls of Alba Iulia. It’s a heavily forested area just past the beginning of a hiking trail. There’s a parking lot and a picnic area. The two black SUVs and the truck are all parked there.”

“Good,” said Sam. “We’re on our way.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“Positive. Have you sent your brother and cousins home?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Now head for the border a different way.”

“I’m going now.”

“Good luck.”

“I give it back. You’re the ones who will need it.”

Sam and Remi drove past the place that Tibor had described and kept going. They found a second parking lot and a marked trail that might have been the other end of the first trail. They turned around and drove back past the parked vehicles toward the Hungarian border.

They drove past Alba Iulia, and then, a few miles on, they reached an area that was more mountainous. As they drove, the highway became a narrow road, with winding pavement and nearly vertical canyon walls that were a tangle of rocks, trees, brush, and vines. Sam kept driving, scanning the land for the perfect spot.

At last, he was sure he had found it. There was a quarter-mile ribbon of road that wound to the left and right, then rose and disappeared over a crest. The mountains of Transylvania held the largest remaining area of the virgin forest that had once covered most of Europe, so the vegetation was thick and wild. Sam stopped the car, then backed up at a high speed until he reached a turnout to allow cars to pass, killed the engine, and popped the trunk.

Remi got out too and retrieved the two shovels, climbing rope, and a crowbar. As she reached for the night vision goggles, Sam said, “We can leave the goggles.”

“Good. That means we’ll be done by dark.”

“Come to think of it, we’d better take them.” He took a shovel, the crowbar, and the rope and began to climb up the wall at the side of the road to the rocky slope above. Remi took the second shovel and began to climb beside him.

“While we’re climbing,” she said, “you can help me find a title for my memoir. Do you like Remi: An American Woman in a Transylvanian Prison? Or does that give away too much? Maybe just Remi: Girl Behind Bars.”

“How about One Lucky Girl: My Life With Sam Fargo?”

She laughed, then climbed harder to get ahead of him. As they climbed higher and higher, she realized that the bulges in the rocky wall and the curve of the road made it impossible to see their car below them. On second thought, it also meant that while they were up here they were not visible from the road. Anyone on the road looking up would see only the rocks.

After more climbing, Sam walked along near the crest for a few hundred feet. Then he took his shovel and began to dig.

“I hope what I’m doing is undermining this boulder. If it rolls straight down the hillside, as round heavy things tend to do, then we’ll have a fairly impressive landslide, block Bako’s road to Hungary, and be on our merry way.”

“Merry? Are you sure?”

“If it works, we will be merry. It just will take an enormous amount of work done in a hurry and a massive helping of luck.” He turned his attention to shoveling away the dirt and small stones that seemed to be holding the four-foot boulder in place a hundred fifty feet above the road. Remi stood on the other side of the boulder and shoveled too.

They reached a moment when the boulder seemed to have emerged from the dirt of the hillside. They had freed more than half of its bulk, and its bottom was undermined. Sam walked a few yards to a sapling, selected a dead limb about ten feet long and two and a half inches thick. He then rolled a nearby rock in front of the boulder to use as a fulcrum.

“Okay, Remi. Go along the ridge until you can see what’s coming from a distance. When it’s safe to drop the hill on the road, give me a wave.”

“I’m off.” She trotted along the ridge, sometimes stopping to jump a gap in the rocks or avoid obstacles. Finally she stood far above the road a distance from Sam, raised her arm, and waved.

Sam set his lever horizontally against the fulcrum and pushed. He was ten feet to the side of the rock so he could use his entire lever. He pushed again and there was something behind the rock that began to groan as the boulder moved.

The first try failed to dislodge the boulder, so Sam set his limb again against the rock. He looked up and saw Remi waving her arms frantically. He waited.

Down below, he saw a bus laboring up the road, the driver making a groaning downshift as it struggled toward the crest. After a minute, Remi waved her arm once more. Sam moved his fulcrum closer to the boulder, set his shoulder against the lever, and pushed with both legs. The boulder rocked forward, rocked back, and then rolled out of the bowl where it had sat. At first, it turned painfully slow, rolling once and then merely sliding, the topsoil too loose to allow it to turn. The boulder scoured the ground and vegetation. It reached a vertical drop of about six feet. When it hit the next group of rocks, it seemed to shatter the shelf where they sat, propelling them forward and downward. The boulder outran the ground debris, but it had dislodged much of the hillside, so at first there was a slide of rocks and gravel, and then a layer of soil with mature trees growing in it started down the hill. The trees remained upright until the rocks and soil caught them by the roots and they plunged. The slide was all very noisy—tons of moving rock and dirt and cracking wood—and then near silence.

Sam looked down. His landside had covered the road from rock wall to rock wall. There were about ten more seconds of small, round dislodged stones bouncing down the last few yards onto the pile and then the silence was total.

Sam grabbed the shovel, rope, and crowbar and trotted along the ridge until he reached Remi. Without speaking, they used their spades to keep from falling and setting off a second landslide. When they made their way down, they ran along the road to their car, threw their tools in the trunk, turned around, and drove off toward Alba Iulia. It seemed to Remi that they were now seeing many more cars and trucks heading along the road than they’d seen at first. All the traffic was heading toward them now. It was after about fifteen minutes that Sam’s driving brought them close to other cars going the same way.

“I hope the cousins all made it out before we wrecked the road,” said Remi.

“I’m sure they did,” said Sam. “We gave Tibor plenty of time. What we need now is a name and phone number of whatever group in Romania controls the smuggling of antiquities.”

“I’ll call Selma,” Remi said.

“Hi, Remi,” said Selma. “Tibor tells me you’ve decided to go it alone again.”

“The other team beat us to Bleda’s burial place. Sam pointed out to me—possibly because of our experience in France—that finding the treasure and bringing it home are two very different things. We are now broadening our game to include being tattletales. Who can we call in Romania to report Bako smuggling antiquities to Hungary?”

“We’d better have Albrecht do that through an intermediary,” said Selma. “The federal police in Romania are run out of a place called the General Inspectorate in Bucharest. We’ll call and say we’ve got a case for Interpol and they’ll send the border police. I can use a computer for the call and run the signal through a couple of forwarding services to keep us out of it.”

“Thanks, Selma.”

“You’re welcome. Bako’ll get in trouble if they catch him. Romania’s Law No. 182 of 2000 says everything found must be registered and given a classification certificate by the government. They consider any antique part of the ‘movable cultural heritage.’”

“We’ll call you as soon as we tie up some loose ends.”

“It’s not over?”

“I’m afraid not. We still have to see the chamber.”

“Be safe.”

They drove through Alba Iulia again, past the wooded area where they had found Bako’s vehicles. They parked at the next parking lot and walked back through the forest. As they came close, they heard a voice shouting in Hungarian what seemed to be instructions. They crept closer, staying low behind bushes, until they could see Bako sitting on the edge of the chamber with his feet dangling in the dark void below. Four men held a rope that was tied around him under his armpits. A fifth man ran up and handed him a flashlight.

Bako pushed off and slid into the chamber. Sam and Remi could see from the twisting of the rope that he was moving around, trying to shine his flashlight into the chamber in every direction at once. A couple of times his men, exhausted from digging and moving stones, seemed likely to lose their grip on the rope and drop him.

At last he was in the chamber. The men relaxed and rubbed sore muscles while the rope went slack. There was a shout from the chamber. The men pulled up the empty harness, and one of the security men put it on and was lowered inside. The rope went slack again, and the men knelt by the entrance to hear the conversation of their superiors. They looked at one another in consternation.

Remi whispered, “Something’s wrong.”

There was another yell from the echoing chamber, and the men exerted themselves to pull their colleague up quickly. He spoke to the others and then they lowered a camera into the chamber. Several times light flashed from the dark entrance up into the surrounding trees. When they pulled up Bako, he stomped around, looking angry, muttering to himself. Suddenly he shouted orders at his men.

The security men worked at loading their equipment into the truck, but they didn’t seem to be bringing many artifacts up from the chamber. There were a few weapons, some textiles, some pottery. There was much conversation in Hungarian, and Bako, his head security man, and two others got into one of the two SUVs.

Remi whispered, “They’re not taking any of the artifacts in Bako’s car.”

Then one of the other security men came and opened the hatch at the back of Bako’s SUV and lifted the rug and a panel to reveal the spare tire and jack. He slipped a sword in a sheath, a belt with a dagger, and a bullet-shaped steel helmet inside. He closed things up and shut the hatch.

“Thank goodness,” she whispered. “At least now he’s guilty of something.”

The SUV backed up, then turned and drove off along the River toward the blocked road.

Two men had been left behind to clean up and then drive the other SUV and the truck back to Hungary. Remi and Sam crawled back through the brush and then walked the rest of the way to their car. They drove back to the last parking lot, playing the car radio so loudly that the men couldn’t help but hear. They slammed the doors and began to walk up the path, making all the noise they could.

By the time they reached the chamber, the two men had gone. They had hastily covered the entrance with brush. As Sam and Remi approached, they heard the two vehicles start and drive off. Sam took the rope he had brought and quickly lowered Remi into the chamber.

Her feet had barely touched when she said, “I can see what’s wrong. Come down quickly.”

Sam joined her and they explored the space together. The skeleton of Bleda lay on a slightly raised bier, like a low bed. In a corner was the three-foot skeleton of Zerco, the dwarf. They both lay in the postures of the buried and both had broken skulls. They had obviously been hit with a heavy weapon. The only treasures in the tomb were much-decayed clothing, leather horse harnesses, and saddles.

“Albrecht was right,” Remi said. “Bleda tried to get rid of Attila and lost.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Sam said. “There’s no treasure. It’s just Bleda’s own stuff. And his friend Zerco. If Bleda had died in an accident, Attila wouldn’t have executed Zerco.”

“We’d better find the inscription,” said Remi. She looked at each of the walls, and Sam scuffled his feet around to see if he could uncover anything on the floor. He saw nothing.

From time to time, Sam checked to detect whether he could hear noises outside. As he did, he instinctively looked up and there saw the inscription. The words were engraved in the stone ceiling above their heads. He touched Remi’s arm and pointed upward. “It’s as though he wanted Bleda to see it.”

Remi took three photographs with her cell phone, and Sam realized why they had seen the flashes when Bako had taken his photographs. He had been aiming upward.

They climbed back up their rope and quickly made their way back to the rental car. As they drove, they passed the SUV and the truck making their way back toward the still-open chamber. They were going to see if it was safe to finish their work.

As Sam drove, Remi sent her photographs to Albrecht and Selma in La Jolla. They continued toward Bucharest for a half hour before Remi’s phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Remi, it’s Albrecht.”

“Did you get our pictures?”

“We did.”

“You saw the way Bleda was buried?”

“Yes.”

“I’d say your theory just got a boost. It was no accident. There was no reason to kill Zerco if Bleda died in an accident.”

“True. But it doesn’t prove which brother was the aggressor.”

“Any news of Bako?” asked Sam.

“Some hopeful signs. Tibor just called and said that two of Bako’s lawyers got on a plane for Bucharest. It could mean he was arrested. But they won’t hold him for long on a charge like removing artifacts.”

“And the inscription we sent?”

“That’s why I called, actually. It says, ‘The death of my dear brother was the saddest day of my life. Before this, the worst was when together we gathered our ancestors’ bones.’”

“We’ve got to get back to Hungary fast,” said Remi. “Bako saw the inscription and tried to leave in that direction. I think we should do the same. If we don’t, Bako might beat us to another one.”

TRANSYLVANIA

“IF WE GET THERE IN TIME, MAYBE WE CAN OUTSMART him,” said Sam. “Bako should still be in Romania dealing with the charge for removing artifacts.”

“But he’s seen the inscription, so he could easily call in his security people to start digging,” said Remi.

“Try to reach Tibor and ask him to watch for any unusual activity among Bako’s men.

“And ask him to find us a helicopter.”

“He’s going to love this,” she said as she autodialed the phone. “Hello, Tibor?”

“Hello, Remi. Am I going to be sorry I answered this call?”

“Probably, but for a short time only. All we need for the moment is for you to have Bako’s men watched—all of them, not just the worst five. And we need a helicopter.”

“A helicopter?”

“Yes. Please tell me you have a cousin.”

“I have a friend. Where do you want him to pick you up?”

“Can he fly in Romania?”

“Yes.”

“Then he can pick us up at Airport. It’s the closest airport. And ask him to bring a pair of binoculars.”

“I’ll call him now.”

“Thanks, Tibor.” She ended the call, then saw something on her phone. “Selma sent us an e-mail.”

“Read it to me so I can keep driving.”

“Okay. Here it is. ‘The next treasure was buried in 441 on the north shore of the Danube River. That was the border between the land controlled by the Eastern Roman Empire and the land of the Huns. The Huns had been gone from the region for a couple of years, 438 through 440. The Romans—or the optimistic Romans, anyway—figured they were gone for good.’”

“That has to be one of the worst assumptions ever.”

“About as bad as they could make.” Remi continued: “‘The Huns had gone east to join the Armenians in their war against the Sassanid Persians. When they came back to their strongholds north of the Danube in 440, they found that while they were gone the Bishop of Marga had crossed the Danube to loot some of the royal graves of the Huns.’”

“A Bishop did that?”

“The church must have had personnel problems. Anyway, ‘The Huns came back and weren’t very happy. Attila and Bleda demanded that the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople hand the Bishop over to them. The Bishop was a pretty slippery character. He immediately realized that the Emperor would order that he be given to the Huns. So he secretly went to the Huns himself and betrayed the city to them. The Huns destroyed the city. Then they went on to take all of the Illyrian cities along the Danube, and Belgrade and Sofia.’”

“I can’t blame them for being angry, but what about the Bishop?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they agreed to keep him alive or killed him, or both,” she said. “‘They reburied the remains of their people. The conjecture is that for funeral goods they used the artifacts stolen by the Bishop, as well as some of the wealth they picked up in sacking all of the other cities.’

“It doesn’t say who was in the royal graves,” said Remi. “But in the tomb message, Attila called them ancestors.”

“So what happened after the reburial?”

“The Huns don’t seem to have been in a better mood. In 443, they looted Plovdiv and Sofia again and then kept going. They made it all the way to Constantinople, where the Emperor Theodosius had to pay them nineteen hundred sixty-three kilograms of gold to leave and had to raise the annual tribute he paid to twenty-one hundred pounds of gold.”

“I hope Bako is waiting to get out of jail and can’t do anything.”

Sam and Remi reached and found it beautiful. The Habsburg-era architecture reminded them of Vienna. Airport signs directed them to Traian Vuia International Airport, where they were able to return their rental car to the Bucharest-based agency. They found their way to the heliport.

The helicopter was already on the pad, and a middle-aged man with a sand-colored mustache and sand-colored hair and wearing a sand-colored leather jacket met them at the gate. “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”

“Yes,” said Sam. In spite of the man’s smile, Sam was not ignoring the possibility that he had been sent by Arpad Bako. Bako was probably sending men out in every direction looking for them by now. But he couldn’t have known they wanted to rent a helicopter. He waited for the man to say something convincing.

“Tibor said you were in a hurry, so I came right away. I’m Emil.”

“You speak such perfect English,” said Remi.

“English is the universal language of fliers,” said Emil. “If a pilot is Swedish and the air controller in Bhutan is from the same Swedish village, they speak English on the radio. Tibor and I both studied English to qualify for pilot training.”

“Tibor is a pilot?” Remi said.

“Much better than I am. He was an airline pilot. He retired only a couple of years ago and started his taxi business.”

“I wonder why he never told us.”

Emil chuckled. “Tibor is one of those people who wants to know about you but thinks it’s a waste of time to tell you all about himself.” He opened the door on the side of his helicopter. “You sit in those two seats,” he said, pointing out two sets of earphones. “You can listen but don’t talk until I tell you. All right?”

“Right,” said Sam. He and Remi climbed into their seats, belted themselves in, and put on their earphones.

Emil radioed the control tower, told them his course, and immediately started the rotors moving. As the engine whipped the rotors around faster, the noise grew, and then they rose into the air, tipped and leaned forward slightly, and headed up, out, and away from the airport and its pattern of runways. Emil headed southwest, climbing gradually as he went. After a while, he reached a ceiling, flew low and steady, but when he was a couple miles from the airport he climbed again. “Now we’re away from the flight paths. You can talk now.”

“Can you head for the north side of the river, along the bank?” asked Remi.

“We’re looking for a place where somebody is digging.”

“Digging?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It’ll probably be a group of five or six men digging holes with shovels. If we get there early enough, we may find them still searching the ground with electronic equipment. We’d like to get a good look at them but not give them the impression we’re interested in them.”

“Ah, that reminds me,” said Emil. “Tibor said you wanted binoculars.” He opened a compartment and lifted the straps of two pair and handed them back to the Fargos.

“Thank you, Emil,” said Remi. “We’re very glad you were available.”

“So am I,” he said. “I don’t usually get to do anything this interesting. Most of the time, I take tourists up to look at the same sights they saw from the ground the day before. Now and then there will be a businessman who needs a quick ride to Budapest or somewhere.”

“Let’s hope this doesn’t get too interesting.”

After a short time, Emil said, “We’re just about at the Hungarian border,” pointing to the river. “Now we’ll swing down along the Danube.”

The Danube was wide and curved, regularly moving around high points in the land. There was plenty of boat traffic, and the river ran through heavily populated areas, with tall buildings almost up to the water’s edge. “The river is an international border, but we’ll be over Hungary on the north side.”

“Stay over land if you can,” said Sam. “We’re looking for ancient graves. We think they’ll be on higher ground and back a bit from the river so they wouldn’t get washed out by floods.”

“I understand,” Emil said. They flew along the Danube from east to west. Where there was an area that looked as though it had been disturbed by digging or had an assortment of trucks and equipment, Sam and Remi would ask Emil to hover so they could take a better look.

They passed near an area that looked peculiar and hovered. About a hundred yards north of the river was an old-fashioned building, painted a buttery yellow, with high roofs and an extensive network of paths leading through formal gardens. There were at least a dozen men with shovels digging holes in the grass, in the middle of flower beds, in the paths. There were another dozen men walking the site with metal detectors and a couple of men pushing magnetometers mounted on wheels along like lawn mowers.

Emil took a second pass above the estate, and what Sam and Remi saw was shocking. Bako’s men had already found several graves and opened them. There were big stones lining open-topped pits and beside them human skeletons thrown aside and piles of metal being loaded into crates. Sam got on his telephone.

“Hello?”

“Albrecht,” said Sam. “We’ve got bad news. I don’t know how Bako did it this time, but my delaying tactics didn’t work. He’s got twenty or thirty men at an estate on the north shore of the Danube. They’re digging up graves and looting them. So far, they’ve got four or five open.”

“We’ve got to move fast,” said Albrecht. “I’ll call our friends at Szeged University and have the authorities move in and put a stop to it. Can you give me an exact location?”

“Our friend Emil probably can.”

“Tell them it’s Count Vrathy’s estate on the south end of Szeged. It’s a museum now. It’s probably closed at this time of day and they must have overpowered the watchman.”

Albrecht said, “I’ve got it. Thank you,” and hung up.

Sam got on his phone again. “Tibor, we’re with Emil in the helicopter.”

“I’d have to be deaf not to hear the rotors.”

“Bako’s men have found the Hun royal graves above the north bank of the Danube at the Vrathy estate. What can you tell me about Bako and the group he took to Romania?”

“They haven’t returned from Transylvania yet.”

“He seems to be substituting quality for quantity, using twenty or thirty men from his businesses to do the digging. We need to prevent them from hiding the treasure.”

“Sam!” said Remi.

“Hold on, Tibor.” He turned to Remi. “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve moved a big boat up to the shore.”

“Tibor? They’re going to load the treasure into a boat. From up here, it looks like a fifty-foot yacht. They’re still digging, so this will take a while. But we need to know where that yacht is from now on.”

“I’ll send men to the river above and below the Vrathy estate to watch where it goes.”

“Good. Thank you. And Remi and I are going to need the equipment we left with the boat on the Tisza. We’ll need our scuba gear, the tool kit, and a covered truck.”

“I’ll call my cousin.”

“And ask him to be sure the air tanks are full.”

“I’ll call when we’re ready.”

Sam, Remi, and Emil kept returning to the airspace above the estate and then flying off into the distance as though they were transporting something on a route that passed over the estate. After about an hour and a half, the boat was loaded and the men with shovels and other equipment had begun getting into trucks to drive away.

Sam leaned forward to talk to Emil. “Emil, you’ve done a wonderful job. We may call on you again. Is there a place where you can set us down within a couple of miles of here without being seen?”

“Yes,” he said. “There’s a landing space near the university. I can put you down there.”

He took them a short distance over the city and set the helicopter down on a large X at the end of a parking lot. “This is it,” he said.

Sam said, “What do we owe you?”

“Nothing. Tibor already paid me for the day.”

Sam handed him five hundred dollars. “Then please accept a small gift with our thanks.”

Emil handed Sam his business card. “I know you can’t read Hungarian, but you can read the phone number. Call it anytime of the day or night. If I can’t help you, I’ll find someone who can.” They shook hands, Sam and Remi got out and the helicopter rose and flew away.

Remi said, “You know, I can’t stop wondering what finally happened to the Bishop who robbed those graves the first time.”

“I think his reputation for shrewdness may have been exaggerated.”

“You think Attila and Bleda killed him?”

“To his people, he was a traitor. To the Huns, he was a grave robber. I’d be surprised if he died in bed.”

“Let’s see if doing the same brings bad fortune for Bako.”

Sam’s phone buzzed. “Hello?”

“It’s me, Tibor. Where are you?”

“At the helipad by Szeged University.”

“Stay there.”

Five minutes later, a white-colored truck with a covered cargo bay appeared at the far entrance to the lot and drove straight across all the lanes to them. When it stopped, Sam and Remi climbed into the cab to join Tibor.

He said, “My cousins tell me the yacht is anchored offshore. Bako’s men loaded fifteen wooden boxes onto the lifeboat and then they took them to the yacht and loaded them onto the deck. So we think they’re getting ready to take the artifacts somewhere by water. The Danube runs through Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania to the Black Sea. Many rivers feed it. They could go anywhere without setting foot on land.”

“Have the police arrived?”

“Nobody has seen them yet.”